© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved
Who made William Caxton's Phrase-Book?
Palmerston North, New Zealand
About 1480 William Caxton issued a phrase-book in French and English from his press at Westminster. It was an unacknowledged adaptation of a French and Flemish text written in Bruges, and its first editor assumed that Caxton was the translator. That view has been vehemently opposed by scholars such as Caxton's biographer N. F. Blake. Central to the debate since 1957, however, has been the belief that the English translation was made in 1465–6. This article shows that the terminal date of 1466 rested on a false assumption. Other evidence indicates that the manuscript from which the phrase-book was eventually printed had been compiled at some time between June 1465 and, at latest, March 1470. It argues further that this dating applies only to alterations made to adapt the work for a specific English market. The original translation could have been made much earlier. Consequently the article revisits the hypotheses that Caxton may have been responsible for both the initial translation and a later revision, itself made some ten years before he put the book into print.